Starring: Olivier Gruner, Brad Dourif, Ernie Hudson, William Zabka

Directed by: Phillip J. Roth

The Story: There's only one thing that almost kept this movie from getting tombstone rating and that's something that happened at the very end. I didn't go into this flick with high expectations. I just wanted an action movie. Olivier Gruner, star of the thrice damned Nemesis, is the hero in this movie. I thought his role in Automatic was kinda cool, so I was willing to sit down in the inferno and view this movie.

As I said, I didn't have high expectations...but my spirits were lifted somewhat when I saw this movie also starred Ernie Hudson and Brad Dourif! But my elation was short lived because it also had Glenn Plummer, who recently soiled this site with the putrid booger of a flick, Rangers. As soon as I recognized Plummer my already not so high expectations sank to subterranean depths. Am I being a little too hard on Plummer? Probably....but if you've seen Rangers you'll understand why. That movie was so horrible I needed a priest to exorcise its taint from my DVD player.

Gruner is Sean, leader of an interception force....basically a group of Mercenaries. When we first meet him its in a scene that really has nothing to do with anything else in the movie....except for a passing reference later on, that still doesn't make a difference. Basically he's caught trying to infiltrate a company called Zircon just so we can see him beat up a dozen or so guys and escape in a "looks cool, but its silly" manner. Then we meet the rest of his team, Dave and Russell. Russell is played by the aforementioned Glenn Plummer and Dave is played by...I dunno, some blond guy. (Actually its William Zabka, the mean kid from the Karate Kid)

Meanwhile Ernie Hudson, listed in the credits as "Major" is playing an Air force Major. He sends a bunch of Stealth bombers to investigate a UFO and they promptly get shot down. Well, not promptly. There's a pretty lengthy sequence involved, but its not that exciting. Anyway, the UFO drops an escape pod that lands in Mexico, just outside of a little town run by a drug lord. Enter Brad Dourif, playing government spook Weber. Weber hires Sean and his team to investigate the crash of the UFO escape pod, but doesn't tell them the truth. He tells them that they're going to retrieve a black box from a downed F-117. Weber also assigns two others to the team...Jena, the communications expert and Perez, some whiz kid guy from MIT. It doesn't take too long for the team to realize that something is very wrong in Mexico. First of all there's a big honking crater where the pod landed....that looks like nothing a crashed F-117 would cause. It looks like the Borg have been there! Secondly Dave goes after a local he sees running into a barn and is killed by an alien force. The others don't witness this but they find his clothes in the barn, all ripped up. Sean and Russell demand answers but Jena isn't very forthcoming....at first. When Russell points a gun at her head she starts talking...only what she says is really really stupid.

Jena tells them that she was on a team years before assigned to get to the bottom of a similar incident in Yellowknife, Canada. again the cover story was a downed aircraft, but in reality it was an alien incursion. In order to keep the alien from making it a more populated area, the US nuked Yellowknife. You read that right, my droogies....America dropped a bomb on Canada and guess what? they covered it up so neatly that no one noticed! When Sean and Russell tell her that her story is, well, a load of bull, she retorts with "When was the last time you met anyone from Yellowknife?'. And that's it. Story bought. I can't even get around how dumb that is. I guess we must have nuked Tibet, Amsterdam and Pittsburg, because I've never met anyone from those places. Stupid ass movie.

To further twist your level of disbelief into a pretzel, this alien doesn't really do anything interesting into well into the film. And it has some gnarly powers! It can change from organic matter to pure energy at will, and can perfectly imitate anything it kills. So what does this being do now that its in our midst? Nothin'! At least nothing until after we have the obligatory bar fight between Sean and Rosario's thugs in a local bar. Personally I'd think that Sean would want to expedite matters and get out of there. If Jena doesn't contact Weber in a few hours and tell him they've captured or killed the alien the area is supposed to get deep fried by a nuclear warhead. The alien finally does get tired of just hanging out and decides to attack. At first it seems to help the team by attacking Rosario's men while they chase Sean and Jena around, in due course all of the humans involved realize that there's a really grouchy space alien around and team up to stop it. That's the condensed version, by the way, folks...because all of the stuff that happened in between what I just wrote and the bar fight is padding! Geez- Louise, it was maddening. And it gets worse....

Would you believe that after all of this has occurred Jena has the nerve to announce that she has brought a weapon the government developed to destroy the alien but until nearly the freaking end of the movie just left it in their truck? Then when she does pull out this magic weapon, she obviously doesn't know how to use it....Jena's fiddles with the thing for several minutes, unable to figure it out. Meanwhile the alien has killed Russell and taken his form...and proceeds to beat the snot out of Sean. This was getting old really fast, too. Anyone else the alien attacks gets whacked in micro seconds, but Sean is able to grapple with it, albeit not well, forever jus' cuz. Trust me, by this time in the movie I was willing to just buy anything as long as it was over. Finally the beast is destroyed, but in the firefight the truck with our heroes radio was destroyed. So now they can't contact Weber (no one has a friggin' telephone?) and the nuclear strike is imminent. Though the alien was blown to tiny bits, like most aliens it only takes a tiny glop of it to recreate itself. This time it does so and takes over Rosario. As Sean, Jena and Perez prepare to get out of town the alienized Rosario shows his true colors. He vaporizes Jena and Perez...which actually made me cheer!...and then beats up Sean so more. (Boo! Just kill him you stupid extra terrestrial boob!) In the skies above the bombers arrive to blast the town just as another alien craft approaches. The pilots fire a nuclear missile...and lordy, don't ask me why a plane carries a nuclear missile that can used in air to air combat...it made my head hurt seeing that....and destroys it. The resulting blast travels downward just slowly enough for the alien to have time to tell Sean that its decided to let him live, but "they'll be back", and for Sean to seek cover in a well from the atomic firestorm.

Now, if you've watched this movie this far you'll just be willing to say, "Screw it, so he out ran a nuclear fireball!". I always found it hilarious in my NBC training when they taught us what to do if we saw the flash of a nuclear bomb. I mean, if I'm that close to the dang explosion I think the only thing I'd have time to do is crap my pants one last time. But Sean survives, so it must have been one of those anti-radiation nukes.....(right). The alien, being a superior life form forgot it could turn into pure energy and zip away or even bother to seek cover itself. Now comes the only part of this farce that made me chuckle. Sean stumbles away from the crater that was once this one horse town and comes upon a woman cowering in the grass. He eyes her suspiciously, since only he and the form changing alien were present for the explosion. Then he hits her! She, of course, gets up screaming "What kind of jerk hits a woman!?" and he tells her he thought she was an alien and the credits start as she throws rocks at him cursing. Its stupid, but it did get at least a grim Infernal smile. Because I would have hit her ass too. How this woman survived being out in the open with a nuclear blast escapes me.

When its all said and done this flick was a fairly pointless exercise. the more I watched it the angrier it made me. It'd be different if the characters were at least interesting or semi-realistic, but no one had any real personality. Russell was just plain annoying, and being played by Plummer didn't help. There was no real reason that we know of for the alien to be there. It couldn't have been an invasion....if so why send only one guy? And according to the movie it wasn't the first time this has happened? What do these aliens do, just decide to f*ck with us instead of really taking over? No one expects Gruner to act....come on, he's an athlete, not a "movie star", but for someone like him to make an action movie work the plot has to make a small amount of sense and the rest of the cast has to be at least a little convincing. The only thing I was truly convinced of was that this movie bites buffalo ass.

Best Lines:  “I grew up in France, right....so if you asked me about wine and cheese I don't think I'd be offended.” - Sean shows us how to NOT be politically Correct.

 Are you kidding me?

1.) The opening sequence has little to do with the movie other than to show us that Sean is a tough guy. We get to see him beat up the same roomful of bad guys twice! Apparently he was sent to this organization to retrieve some computer data that the head bad guy has in his body! ("You've turned yourself into a human hard drive!") Clever as that may seem, the guy has a port sticking out of his chest! Wouldn't that be really uncomfortable? If you were going to have a freaking male connector sticking out of your body why not put it between your ass cheeks where someone might not be willing to look for it?

2.) Not that I've seen a lot of plane crashes but that is one big freakin' crater. I'm having a hard time suspending my disbelief on this one, too. Maybe a falling Aircraft carrier could do that kind of damage, but an F-117?

3.) I'm no fan of Glenn Plummer in the first place. His role in the incredibly awful Rangers has already earned him a special place in the bowels of the Inferno. But his role as Russell in this movie would have done that regardless. Plummer, just simply, is not believable. He just sounds fake, every time he opens his mouth. The dialogue he has isn't doing him any favors either. When he goes on his tirade about not being paid as much as Perez and Jena I almost threw my remote at the screen. I see Plummer being enshrined near Maria Ford in the Infernal Hall of Wretched Acting.

4.) Now that I actually think about it, Russell would be about the last guy I'd want on my team if I were Sean. More than halfway through the movie and I don't recall Russell doing anything even halfway useful! During the bar fight he doesn't rush in to help Sean out, but instead fires his Uzi blindly into the bar from the street! Not only could he have killed an innocent bar patron, he could have killed Sean by accident! (Indeed, Sean is forced to duck) This is a professional mercenary? Idiot. I was hoping that Sean would have shoved that Uzi up as his ass after that.

5.) So no one is going to notice that the US just dropped a nuke on Mexico?

6.) Rosario and his gang are a notorious drug cartel? What's the point in being a drug lord if you have to live in a dump of a town like the one in this flick? I said the same thing about Powers Boothe's character in Extreme Prejudice. Yeah, he's the head honcho and has a sh!tload of cash, but he lives in a toilet! I'd rather be a low income moron and live in relative cleanliness. Maybe the recession is affecting the drug trade or something.

Nudity and Sex: A stripper is seen in Rosario's bar.

Huh?:

What is it about movie tough guys that they always have to be chewing something? I don't even think they have any gum, but the characters of Sean and Dave are constantly making that chewing motion with their jaws...it happens a lot in movies and frankly its pissing me off. I think these guys are just chewing their cud, like cows. (whatever the hell Cud is.)

Jena sure takes her sweet ass time before using the secret weapon on the alien. There must have been at least a half dozen opportunities to fire the thing at the creature but she's too busy dinking around with it. Its a good thing the monster was doing battle with Sean....after all, anyone else the alien fights ends up being killed easily, but since Sean is the hero he can grapple with the beast for an extended period giving Jena's slow behind enough time to fire. Still, I think Sean should at least smack her one for letting him get his head caved in by the pseudo-Russell while she screwed around.

After the alien is blasted to pieces, Perez collects some samples in what looks like an empty jar of Smuckers Jelly! Then he puts it in his coat pocket! What the flyin' hell....that's the extent of his scientific preservation of alien bio matter? A jelly jar!? Are you kidding me!? And in his coat pocket!? Think about that...really, think about it.

To make it worse, later on Perez notes that the other 200 pounds of alien goo chunks are gone. He muses that it must have evaporated. Yeah, Perez....no cause for alarm. After all, its not like the alien could have reformed itself. Its just as unlikely as as it being able to change form at will or turn into pure energy....friggin' imbecile.

The Final Judgment: Even if you're a fan of Olivier Gruner, I'd suggest skipping this flick....because you might get pissed at Mr. Gruner. This was one of those movies that really made me upset that I watched it.

This Movie is now sentenced to be tossed out of the Infernal Airlock. It will forever float through the empty void of Infernal Space unable to contaminate other Science Fiction flicks with its foulness. So Speaks the Inferno!